Organizational consumerism: the appropriation of packaged managerial knowledge

Many academics have highlighted the emergence of programmed change initiatives such as TQM and BPR and have chronicled how “seductive” these ideas appear to have been in the corporate world. Moreover, a burgeoning consultancy industry has emerged, with management consultants fuelling the process. Seeks to make sense of the processes through which consultancy ideas are appropriated by client organisations. Based empirically on a series of interviews with senior managers and management consultants working within a privatised public utility, the arly findings from this research suggest that the relationships between the organisation and the consultant can best be viewed as a relationship of consumption. Thus it is argued that the senior managers were consuming the programmed change initiative as a means of communicating their managerial capability to the external corporate world.